How does the Retirement Calculator work

The key element in estimating retirement corpus is knowing how much money you spend each month to support your lifestyle. Let’s say you earn 2 Lakhs per month, of which you spend 50% on average and save the rest. Then you need plan for a corpus that will generate 1 Lakh per month at today’s value of money.

In reality, your monthly fund requirements after retirement will differ slightly from the present. This is because certain expenses that you have now, may not be relevant or change after you retire. This may include EPF payments, other pension premiums, employment related expenses, viz.transportation and likes. On the other hand, your medical expenses are expected to increase and this need to be provisioned. You can break these up to come up with an accurate number on the monthly spend, although, for simplicity, we have assumed that the reductions current expenses will be offset by increase in the medical expenditure, and as such, the fund requirements before and after retirement will remain more or less unchanged, at constant purchasing power.

However, purchasing power of money reduces with time. So if you need 1Lakh per month today, and you are 40 years old, you will need 1 Lakh x (1+0.05)^20 ~ 2.65Lakhs per month at retirement, assuming 5% inflation and 60 years of retirement age.

Assuming life expectancy of 85 years, you will then need to build a corpus that will generate inflation adjusted equivalent of Rs2.65 Lakhs pm for the next 25 years. Additionally, your retirement corpus should generate interest income after offsetting inflationary effects. This is called inflation adjusted returns on the corpus and needs to be accounted for. To calculate this, the concept generally used is called present value of future annuities.

ViniyogIndia Retirement Calculator encapsulates this complicated math & presents a simple interface to our users to accurately estimate the desired retirement corpus.